Publication details

Programming Constraint Inference Engines

Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, Vol. 1330 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 519--533, Springer-Verlag, October 1997

Existing constraint programming systems offer a fixed set of inference engines implementing search strategies such as single, all, and best
solution search. This is unfortunate, since new engines cannot be
integrated by the user. The paper presents first-class computation
spaces as abstractions with which the user can program inference engines
at a high level. Using computation spaces, the paper covers several
inference engines ranging from standard search strategies to techniques
new to constraint programming, including limited discrepancy search,
visual search, and saturation. Saturation is an inference method for
tautology-checking used in industrial practice. Computation spaces have
shown their practicability in the constraint programming system Oz.